The closure is understood to be the result of budget cuts and poor staffing and Ms Aitchison has called on Minister for Police and Emergency Services David Elliott, for immediate answers.

Outlying stations at East Maitland and Rutherford were left to cover the city during Monday's closure.

The new Rutherford station was commissioned in 2015 after the station at Telarah closed.

Ms Aitchison met with Metro North 3 Chief Superintendent (Fire and Rescue) Brett Davies and Zone Commander Superintendent Gregory Symonds last week.

They updated her on the management of retained fire fighters at Maitland Station.

Supt Symonds told her that Monday's closure was "the first closure for this year."

"I am putting a question on notice through the Upper House to get some figures on this," Ms Aitchison said.

She said she understood that Maitland was a "special roster station" (permanent staff Monday to Friday 8am to 4.30pm), but when the government closed Telarah, the permanent staff were transferred to the new station at Rutherford and Maitland became a fully retained station.

Ms Aitchison wants answers on:

. Who authorised the closure,

. how many times Maitland station will be closed in future and for how long and

. what is the workforce plan to keep Maitland operational.

Fire Brigade Employees Union State Secretary Leighton Drury said this government and its constant budget cuts will lead to tragedy.

"Playing Russian roulette with communities by not keeping stations open is disgraceful and dangerous," he said.

"The Berejiklian Government said that there would be no cuts to the frontline, it appears they believe firefighters aren't frontline.

"Communities need and expect us to be there when they need us most, we know all to well the tragic impact decisions like this can have," Mr Drury said.

A statement from Fire and Rescue NSW said: "Maitland Fire Station is staffed by retained (on-call) firefighters. A number of the retained firefighters, many of whom work full time, are not always available to respond to emergencies during the day.

"The station was temporarily offline between 10am and 4pm Monday. During this time, the community of Maitland remained well protected by permanent firefighters from East Maitland Fire Station, permanent and retained firefighters from Rutherford Fire Station and retained firefighters from Morpeth Fire Station.

The practise of taking stations offline is not new. Due to the large network of fire stations, Fire and Rescue NSW resources are routinely moved around to cover for training, major incidents and other operational needs."

Ms Aitchison said she understood it has been difficult to have a full complement of retained fire fighters available to attend call outs in the station. "And there have been attempts to increase the pool of retained fire fighters from 12 to 17 personnel in order to achieve this," she said.

"There is currently one vacant retained position and I understand that this is being recruited for at the moment."

Ms Aitchison said she is particularly concerned about the lack of redundancy. "Maitland is a large regional city which can take up to 45 minutes to drive across during peak times," she said.

'If we were to experience a devastating house fire with multiple casualties similar to what tragically happened in Singleton last week, I'm wondering what guarantees the government can give to my local community that we would be adequately resourced to deal with a second incident if Maitland is taken off line," she said.